[what part of Friday's pd day looked like]
In case you hadn’t noticed, the date for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair has been announced. And did you know that this month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Factory Reading Series? We already know this
year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of above/ground press (there is still time to catch a 2018 subscription, by the by).
Ottawa ON: A number of years ago,
Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series opened a series of readings (roughly one a year)
of featuring three or four poets instead of the usual one or two, attempting to
feature poets not considered ready for a full-length reading as part of the
series (I remember disagreeing entirely with the premise when it emerged; why
not give them full readings?). Called 'hot ottawa voices,' the series has extended into one they've been calling 'local lights,' for poets without trade collections, but with chapbooks. As part of the most recent of such, held in
December 2017, leaf editions, an extension of Tree Press, produced the chapbook
LOCAL LIGHTS, featuring work by Chris Johnson, Sarah Kabamba (who was shortlisted last fall for the CBC Poetry Prize)
and Rod Peterson (former director of The TREE Reading Series, who began the “local
lights” series during his tenure).
home
he smells like home
but these days home smells like war & smoke
she’s tired of burning & the ashes she
carries
in her bones are heavy & all her body knows
is to run
some nights her body is a battle ground
landmines going off underneath his touch
he carries bombs underneath his tongue
& kisses her like it’s his last breath
(Sarah Kabamba)
There
is a lightness to Kabamba’s poems that is quite striking, one that blends very
nicely with her subject matter, and allowing her poems not to be weighed down
entirely. The four poems by Chris Johnson’s poems in this collection work to
explore space and rhythm in more overt ways than I’ve seen in his previous work,
moving away from tighter prose-poems to a more open form for a deeper
exploration into collage, narrative disjunction and accumulation.
My
only real complaint about this wee chapbook: why aren’t there any author
biographies included?
San Francisco/Oakland
CA:
From Californian chapbook publisher Drop Leaf Press [see my “12 or 20 (small press) questions” with them here] comes Philadelphia poet Kevin Varrone’s Redemption Center (2017), a collection
of short first-person lyric poems:
if I had two nickels to rub together
I would rub them together
like a kid rubs sticks together
until friction made combustion
and they burned
a hole in my pocket
into which I would put my hand
and then my arm
and eventually my whole self—
I would fold myself
into the hole in my pocket and disappear
into the pocket of myself, or at least my pants
but before I did
like some ancient star
I’d grab your hand.
Compared
to the prose-pieces in his full-length box score: an autobiography (Furniture Press Books, 2014), the eight poems
included here are relatively straightforward, composed as meditations akin to
short essays. I say straightforward, but almost deceptively so, writing out a series
of turns and turns, skips and short clips, somewhere between the sharpness of
rough sketch and carved, polished stone. I’m curious about the shift, and wonder
if a full-length collection is in the works; curious to see the shape such a
collection might take, especially after his book-length baseball poem.
two birds
if we can conceive of killing
two birds
with one stone
why not then imagine
leaving it un-
thrown,
two birds
in a bush, un-
leavened & a stone
in a hand, un-
turned, unflown
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